How does the thought of Søren Kierkegaard apply to challenges facing human freedom? This session includes interpretations on freedom, unfreedom, faith, and reason through the religious and philosophical thought of Søren Kierkegaard. The papers apply Kierkegaard's ideas to concerns such as hyper-incarceration and increasing global prison populations, the crisis of the individual in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and contemporary debates on the relationship between the self and faith and reason. The papers pressure Kierkegaard's writings on the categories of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious to offer clarity and clarification of his ideas and texts, as well as analyses on pressing existential questions and demands placed before humanity. What is the proper existential relation of the self before God? How do we orient ourselves toward the good, the true, and the possibility of redemption? How does unfreedom in the world impact being captive in the idea of God?
As Kierkegaard deemed imprisonment to be an evil (et onde), this paper aims to begin a dialogue on Kierkegaard and prison reform in three ways: first, through a review of scholarship related to Kierkegaard and incarceration; second, by situating Kierkegaard in recent discussions on chaplaincy, pastoral care, and theological education in prisons; and thirdly, through a close reading of ideas on the demonic, the imprisoned self, and the crowd in Kierkegaard’s writings. Ultimately, I intend to show the contributions Kierkegaard can make to debates on prison reform in the United States and globally. Whereas religious scholars, philosophers, legalists, and ethicists have written extensively on punishment, prisons, and prison reform through the work of thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, and certainly Foucault, the scholarship is less developed in the context of Kierkegaard’s ideas. This absence only increases the need to turn to Kierkegaard on a substantive moral concern.
How Kierkegaard’s view on the relationship between faith and reason should be interpreted remains a fertile question. Prominent interpretations have debated the relationship between faith and reason in terms of their greater or lesser conceptual compatibility or opposition. However, in this paper I argue that Kierkegaard should not be interpreted as laying claim to or landing in a rigid conceptual debate about faith and reason. If faith and reason implicate the ethical and existential commitment of the self, and the self is a dynamic synthesis that temporally strives to live out and relate to the good and the true. I argue that to understand faith and reason, the self must be examined. The self as a synthesis is tasked with reflecting on the true and good. Although the true and eternal offends, that is, outstrips her reason, she is tasked with appropriating and evincing a relation that truth existentially.
In conversation with Friedrich Nietzsche and René Girard, this paper develops an account of Kierkegaard’s stages on life’s way and applies them to a reading of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and especially to the relationship between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov.